Darkest India eBook

1. It will seek to divert into more profitable
channels the steadily increasing torrent of immigration
from the villages to the towns.

2. It will re-direct and re-distribute the masses
of the Submerged Tenth who already exist in every
large city.

Like his English representative, the Indian village
bumpkin has a natural aversion to town life.
Peculiarities in his dialect, dress, and manners make
him the laughing-stock of the clever Cockney townsman.
His simplicity and ignorance of the world cause him
to be easily victimised by the city sharper, for whom
he is no match in the struggle of life. He sighs
for his green fields, and longs to get away from the
bustle that everywhere surrounds and bewilders him.
He surrenders these preferences only, because starvation
is staring him in the face, and he has better chances
of working, begging, or stealing in the city than in
his village.

And yet within a few miles of his birthplace there
are frequently tracts of waste land amply sufficient
to support him and thousands more. He could reduce
it to cultivation if he had the chance. He would
infinitely prefer eking out the scantiest existence
in this manner to flinging himself into the turbulent
whirlpool of town life. Strangely enough the
“Sirkar” (Government), to whom these tracts
belong, is equally anxious that the land in question
should be cultivated. It would yield in the course
of a few years as rich a revenue as the acres of exactly
similar soil that have been brought under cultivation
in the neighbourhood. But the difficulties in
the way are well nigh insuperable:

1. The congested labor consists almost entirely
of those castes which are looked upon as inferior.
The very idea of their emancipation is distasteful
to the higher castes, who enjoy in most parts of India
an almost exclusive monopoly of the land. Hence
any effort to obtain a grant of waste land is met
with strong and often bitter opposition, and it is
next door to impossible for any one in the position
of the Submerged Tenth to fight the battle through.

2. Of course, under the British Government these
caste distinctions are not officially recognised.
But as a matter of fact they still carry great weight.
Anybody can, it is true, petition the Government for
a grant of this land, but to secure favourable consideration
is almost impossible. During the last four or
five years I have personally interested myself in
several petitions, with a view to assisting the petitioners,
whom I knew to be thoroughly deserving of success.
And yet after going through a weary tissue of formalities,
seldom lasting less than a year, I have not known
of a single favourable answer, nor have these advances
met with the least sort of encouragement. The
Government officials to whom these vast estates are
entrusted are mostly so preoccupied with other work
that it is impossible for them to give to the subject
the personal attention that it requires, and they are
guided by the reports of interested and sometimes
bribed subordinates. The very fact that they
are entitled to draw exactly the same salary whether
the public estate improves or not, removes the incentive
that would otherwise exist, even if they were the
absentee landlords of the property, while the constant
liability to be transferred from one district to another
aggravates the difficulty of the situation.